[I'm writing replies I promise but I just had a thought an I need to show y'all something] [The sides through a protanopia filter] [plus remy and picani because I had to find an image of all the sides together]
[Like. Like.] [This is close to the "colorblindness" snakes have. Snakes don't have a red cone, only green and blue, like protanopia.] [This is the colorblindness I headcanon for Janus because snake]
[The creativitwins look like they're wearing matching colors.] [Roman's red and Remus' green look practically identical] [Janus' yellow stands out and looks only a little more yellow .] [Logan's colors are the only ones that don't change. Even Patton looks desaturated, and Virgil looks blue.]
Idk if I've really discovered anything with this, but I noticed something about the backgrounds and such with the new song and album.
They seem to be images rendered in colorblind setting. Specifically tritanopia, a blue-yellow colorblindness that is one of the rarest forms of colorblindness overall, caused by a complete absence of s-cones in the retinas (and bc of that it is classified as a dichromacy, where individuals have only two types of functioning color receptors instead of the usual three). In short, individuals with this condition have difficulty seeing blue and yellow hues.
Ya wanna know how I learned that there's different forms of colorblindness?
Halo.
I cannot for the fucking LIFE OF ME find the exact source for this, I keep bloody forgetting it, but I read somewhere that the Sangheli from Halo naturally have tritanopia, which is ironic because their blood is a very intense indigo/purple/blue. As well as many of their ships are various shades of dark purple inside and out. So I was like "huh, I've never heard of this, lemme look it up", and then I learned that there's seven different types of colorblindness. I know Ves is a Halo fan but there is a hilarious amount of references to it in the discography if you know what to look for, and I do because I love the franchise myself.
So uh, yeah, if I've connected any dots with this, who's eyes are we looking through? Is Sleep or Vessel tritanopic? Is this just how Arcadia looks?
tritanomaly — a pride flag for those with tritanomaly colorblindness, or alleviated blue-yellow colorblindness.
tritanopia — a pride flag for those with tritanopia colorblindness, or blue-yellow colorblindness.
achromatopsia — a pride flag for those with achromatopsia colorblindness, or complete colorblindness.
flags for colorblindness types, something i just was interested in making for flag design experimenting. if flags have been made already, consider these alternates.
Our first delivery after a bit of shore leave at the local space station, and it was a stealth mission. The client didn't say why they needed this delivery to be handed over without catching the attention of the authority figures at their work site, but they were paying extra for it. I wasn't part of the conversation. I don't know what other details Captain Sunlight got from them to make sure this was a safe risk on our account. But she was always smart about that sort of thing, and at any rate, she assured us all that we didn't need to worry. Flying in to an unpopulated area out of sight of the main science installation would be fine.
We trusted that, but we were curious. And since the client was human, the rest of my crewmates volunteered me for the delivery in hopes of wheedling out some tactful details.
I didn't object. I wanted to know too.
So I got into my exo suit, checking all the seams and settings even though the safety gear was inspected regularly. This planet wasn’t even all that dangerous according to the readings — it was mostly terraformed to an acceptable standard, though the air wasn’t quite up to standard levels yet — but this felt like a good time to be careful. I wasn’t likely to be entrusted with any secrets if I passed out from lack of oxygen.
Paint was waiting for me with the box. “We’re almost there!” she said, scaly tail swishing behind her. “Best of luck!”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the box and wondering for the umpteenth time what was inside it. The logos were all from a megastore at the space station. Zhee had picked it up, and it was already sealed when he signed for it as official intermediary courier. The person at the checkout counter hadn’t known what it held either.
The engines made their usual landing hum. Since our ship had good landing gear and reliable artificial gravity, it would have been easy to miss otherwise. Paint scuttled out of the way while I walked toward the exit. Blip and Blop peeked around a corner, frills waving in curiosity. Zhee was parked in a cross hallway, not trying to hide.
He tapped one bug leg on the floor and said, “I hope to hear any juicy secrets first.”
Before I could answer that, Mur scooted by in a quiet slap of tentacles and put in, “I’ll be in the cockpit to see if Wio can eavesdrop with the sensors.”
I left Zhee to grumble about it and threaten to tattle on Mur for bothering the pilots. We all knew Zhee was just jealous that he was too big to perch in an out-of-the-way corner. At least he wasn’t Trrili’s size; she barely fit in the cockpit at all.
The door panel said the airlock was engaged, and the air outside was as expected. I stepped through the first door with the box held tight, letting it close behind me with a shush of air that drowned out the bickering in the hallway.
The outside door opened to let in bright sunlight, alien air, and distinctly less gravity. I didn’t notice that last until I stepped out onto the ramp and nearly made a fool of myself. Caught my balance, though. I tried not to leave finger-shaped dents in the box as I hopped awkwardly down the ramp and mentally kicked myself for not reading the briefing more thoroughly. I’d been focused on the air and hadn’t noticed that the gravity was lower than I was used to.
No time to worry about that now, though: a pair of human shapes in bright red exo suits were approaching from the edge of the flat rocky area. A metal roof visible over the boulders behind them was probably their own shuttle. Everything else in sight was rocks in a range of gray-to-orange colors. A hill in the distance held tinges of green that could have been plants.
“Hello!” said the human who was one step ahead of the other. She sounded a little younger than me. Her face wasn’t visible through the reflective visor. So clandestine. “Thank you for being prompt.”
I said, “We aim to please,” and managed to stop moving without smashing into either of them. They had clearly been working here long enough to get a feel for the gravity. “Here is your package,” I said as I handed it over, “And here is the payment tablet,” I added once my hands were free. I unhooked it from my waistband and passed it to the second human.
The first was busy ripping the box open like a kid with an anticipated present.
“Oh good, it’s the right kind!” she said in relief. She set the box on the dusty ground and pulled out something that I recognized as a turbo cleaning wand, the kind usually marketed towards the parents of small children. I’d seen artists use them too, both for cleanup and for making some neat inverted-color murals.
Not wanting to sound like I was doing more than making conversation, I said, “I’ve heard those are good ones.”
“They’re definitely the fastest,” the human said. “Lemme just see if they work on this particular ink.” She opened a thigh pocket with a rip of velcro, and took out what looked like a chunk of tile with deep pink scribbles on it.
The other human finished with the payment tablet and handed it back. “They’d better work,” he said. “If not, we’re toast.”
“How come?” I asked with concern in my voice, hoping that wasn’t too much.
I shouldn’t have worried. The first human activated the wand and wiped the tile clean in one swift pass, then laughed with clear relief. “Saved! We should have just enough time to get everything before the inspectors arrive. Now we just have to hope Julian didn’t leave any more of his rude notes somewhere we haven’t found. The shopping lists and tally marks would be bad enough, but his stuff would get all three of us canned immediately.”
I looked in the direction of the large encampment I’d seen from space. “Are you working this whole place alone?”
She laughed and put the tile back in her pocket. “Oh no, we’re just the only humans here. Everybody else is a Waterwill. Did you know those guys can’t see the color magenta?”
“Really!” I said. This was news to me.
She pulled a pen out of a different pocket. “These are completely invisible if you write on a pale surface. Which has been handy for keeping track of specimens when we feel lazy, and leaving each other notes by the door..”
“…But Julian took it a bit too far,” added the other guy. “With this gravity, he jumps and writes insults on the ceiling.”
“Ah,” I said. “I see why that might not go over well with inspectors. Who are not Waterwills, I take it?”
“Nope,” said the first human as she stowed the wand back in the box then picked the whole thing up. “But they’re not coming until tomorrow, so we should be able to clean it all away in time. Even if we have to do some quiet climbing around in the middle of the night.”
“Hey, what’s that?” the other human interrupted, reaching for something else in the box. He came up with a bundle of green cloth.
“Oh!” said the first. “That’s for Julian. I’m going to say it was at the bottom of the last food shipment as an error.”
When the guy unfolded it, the cloth proved to be a T-shirt patterned in green specks of multiple shades. The side toward me had black text that said “The Best.”
But the two humans were laughing about something on the back. When they saw my confusion, the guy turned it around.
Among all those green dots were a series of orange ones that spelled out “I’m colorblind! And also an asshole.”
The first human explained to me, “Julian is actually red-green colorblind. The magenta pens were for his benefit originally, since they don’t blend with the green ones like red does, and sometimes we need to chart things in color-coding. But—”
“But the Waterwills can’t see it at all,” the second continued. “So they were retired. Officially.”
“I see,” I said. “Well. Best of luck in cleaning up his messes!”
“Thank you!” they chorused. Once the shirt was stuffed into the bottom of the box and the lid was safely shut, they gave me a wave and bounded across the low-gravity rocks toward their waiting shuttle.
I made my awkward way back up the ramp to where my alien coworkers were waiting. I was considering an impromptu color vision test for them, just to see if something bright and obvious to me was invisible someone else onboard.
But then I realized that it would lead to a contest for smell-vision, and I was absolutely rubbish at that.
~~~
These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.
Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.
The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).
Freeman: You're going to relegate my history to a month?
Wallace: Oh, come on...
Freeman: What do you do with yours? Which month is White History Month?
Wallace: Well...
Freeman: Come on, tell me.
Wallace: Uh... I'm Jewish.
Freeman: Which month is Jewish History Month?
Wallace: There isn't one.
Freeman: Oh. Oh. Why not? Do you want one?
Wallace: No, no.
Freeman: I don't either. I don't want a Black History Month. Black History is American History.
Wallace: How are we gonna get rid of racism un--
Freeman: Stop talking about it. I'm going to stop calling you a white man. And I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace, you know me as Morgan Freeman.
I feel like one of those "sure grandma, lets get you to bed" memes when I say this, but computer games used to accommodate the colorblind. I've been playing the papa louie games recently and in cupcakeria, every icing color is labeled with a different letter, every shaker has a different shape and symbol, every syrup has a different symbol, and every cake that isn't extremely contrasting has a different pattern. its colorful, but accommodates those who can't see it. games used to have a colorblind mode, where colors changed to patterns. I've never seen a mobile game that does this. sure grandma, lets get you to bed
